Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy has caused exaggerated fear and confusion for many women

Friday, December 27, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: Angelina Jolie, double mastectomy, breast cancer

(NaturalNews) The decision by actress and newfound cancer industry spokeswoman Angelina Jolie to broadcast the cutting off of both her breasts through a double mastectomy earlier this year has generated quite a bit of confusion among the female population, according to new reports. Many women have reportedly developed an exaggerated fear about their risk of developing breast cancer, say some sources, as the direct result of Jolie's viral media blitz.

As you may recall from back in May, Jolie wrote an op-ed piece published in The New York Times that advocated preventative breast removal surgery, particularly among healthy women with the allegedly "defective" BRCA gene. Believing that her personal risk of getting breast cancer was exponentially higher due to having both the BRCA gene and a family history of the disease, Jolie decided to lop off both her breasts in an attempt to minimize this supposed risk.

But lost in translation during all the media fanfare about Jolie's decision was the fact that most women do not even possess the BRCA gene, which means that the already questionable preventative mastectomy procedure will do them no good at all. Additionally, a followup survey conducted after the publishing of Jolie's article revealed that, while a vast majority of Americans ended up hearing about it, fewer than 10 percent of them knew the circumstances leading up to it, including why Jolie decided to have her breasts removed.

"In the general population, one in 300 to one in 500 women have (the mutations)," explained Dina L.G. Borzekowski, a professor of behavioral and community health at the University of Maryland (UM) School of Public Health, to the New York Daily News about the rarity of the BRCA gene. Borzekowski and her team from UM were the ones who conducted the survey.

Jolie's double mastectomy an obvious lure to bait more women into cancer treatment

Worse is the fact that only a very small percentage of those who said they approved of Jolie's decision to go public had even read what she published. Most people merely assumed that Jolie knew what she was talking about when it came to her risk of developing cancer, even though they had not actually investigated it themselves.

This, of course, seems to have been the intent of Jolie's article all along -- to normalize the idea that women need to get preventative mastectomies for their own protection. It does not really matter that most women do not even have the so-called "faulty" BRCA gene, or that the BRCA gene is probably not even faulty to begin with. No, just scare as many women as possible into thinking that they need surgery to avoid cancer and, voila, the cancer industry has a whole new stream of revenue.

"Women are confused primarily because the mainstream medicine along with the breast cancer awareness groups promulgate widespread disinformation about breast cancer and mammography," wrote one NYDN commenter about the issue. "For instance, the medical establishment has spread the lie that mammograms emit harmless doses of x-rays when in fact low dose medical x-rays cause breast cancer."

Sources for this article include:

http://www.nydailynews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://science.naturalnews.com